Chinese AI Model Usage Surpasses US... What’s the Reason?

Four Out of the Top Five Most Used Models Are Chinese

Chinese Token Usage Reaches 4.12 Trillion

It has been reported that Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models have been used more frequently than their American counterparts on global open-source AI platforms.

According to Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily on February 28, data from the US-based AI model service platform OpenRouter shows that from February 9 to 15, the token usage of Chinese AI models reached 4.12 trillion. This is the first time that Chinese models have surpassed the US, which recorded 2.94 trillion tokens. A token is the smallest unit processed by an AI model; in English, one word often corresponds to one token.

Deepseek logo. Photo by Reuters and Yonhap News

From February 16 to 22, the token usage of Chinese AI models further increased to 5.16 trillion, while the usage of US AI models decreased to 2.7 trillion, widening the gap even more.

During this period, four out of the top five global models by token usage were Chinese AI models. The top spot was taken by M2.5 from MiniMax, followed by Kimi from Moonshot AI, K2.5, GLM-5 from Zhipu AI, and V3.2 from Deepseek, in that order.

Sing Tao Daily commented on this trend, stating, "The era in which American AI models dominated OpenRouter over the past year has come to an end." OpenRouter, with over 5 million users, is a platform that allows users to select and use AI models from various companies in one place. The token usage rankings on OpenRouter are considered an indicator of global AI usage trends. Notably, nearly half of OpenRouter’s users are American, yet they are choosing Chinese AI models more frequently. As of last year, the proportion of OpenRouter users by country was 47.17% from the US and 6.01% from China.

The main factor cited for the competitive advantage of Chinese AI models in the global market is their low cost. According to OpenRouter’s published prices, MiniMax M2.5 costs about $1.10 per 1 million tokens, whereas Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 costs about $25 per 1 million tokens.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.